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0 pointslelanthran2y ago0 comments

> Rust is better for this since your program won’t even compile until you’ve handled those error states.

How is that better for developing a sense of paranoia around error states?

"Throw it at the wall and see what sticks" does not exactly lead to "extreme paranoia managing errors".

0 comments

You're placing a lot of trust in it not being undefined behavior.

Additionally, of course anything can be done with enough time and effort but the costs add up when you are doing things manually rather than letting the compiler handle it. Compiler has had many person-years of effort spent in ensuring the output is correct, can we do the same for all the code we write?

BazookaMusic2y ago

It helps because the instinct is to write lazy code that may fail and the rust compiler will annoy you until it compiles. Every annoyance to fix is a thing you usually need to think about in other languages.

For example, if I'm coding in C# it's easier for me to understand the impact of passing our resources that need to be disposed and good patterns to handle that after Rust has made me lose hairs on this concept.

janalsncm2y ago

This raises the question of whether that extreme paranoia prevents critical errors in code. The fact that so many of the issues still persist suggests it does not.

You can tell people to be careful drivers all you want, but what really saves lives is airbags, crumple zones, and seatbelts.

iforgotpassword2y ago

Because you can't let a driver crash and have a fatal accident as a lesson. That's what this is about. Make it hard and cumbersome, by having students build something non-trivial. I think another benefit of doing it is the Ikea effect, after you've put some effort into the project and see it come together, you might start caring about it and are motivated to get it to work well. Hopefully then some of that mindset carries over when using high level languages and huge frameworks.

lelanthranOP2y ago

> This raises the question of whether that extreme paranoia prevents critical errors in code. The fact that so many of the issues still persist suggests it does not.

> You can tell people to be careful drivers all you want, but what really saves lives is airbags, crumple zones, and seatbelts.

Could just be that the frequency of repeated accidents (and the related injuries) is too low to instill paranoia. The analogy is not the same as with programming in C, where the frequency is "multiple times a day", and not "less than once in a lifetime.

IOW, I feel that

> The fact that so many of the issues still persist suggests it [extreme paranoia] does not.

is inaccurate.

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